Monday, June 11, 2012

OK, before I start blogging about Jane McGonigal’s ideas, I
want to put a definition or two on the table.Not because I am all about semantics, but because it is important that
we are talking about the same thing.

A game is something you do for fun.A gamified process is something that you are
doing for another reason, but because you have applied gaming principles to its
design, it happens to be fun also.This
may seem like a small nuance, but it is really important.A gamified process is a lot harder to design
because you need to make sure that the precision and accuracy of performance
meets the requirements of the process.A
game where you fly a plane is a lot different than a gamified plane simulator
where you learn how to fly a plane.In
the game, you can fake accuracy and precision as much as necessary to keep the
game fun (Guitar Hero does this liberally).In the simulator, the
trainee’s ability to take off and land accurately is pretty important.
The fun has to be secondary.

This makes gamification a much harder objective than game
design.Even though McGonigal’s book
pastes over this key difference, I think she realized it was there but just
didn’t want to muddy the clarity of her message.

I promised that I would write a few choice blog posts on
Jane McGonigal’s book on games and how they could change the world.I will start out by talking about her basic
premise.

Her point is that we enjoy playing games (because of several
design attributes that I will talk about in future posts) and that enjoyment
makes us more productive and more effective.So we could make the world a better place if we apply gaming principles
to things like work tasks, civic activities, social action, philanthropy, friendship/romantic
activities, household/domestic responsibilities, and pretty much anything you
can think of.

The logic is very consistent.If we really do work harder, longer, and
better on games and if we can effectively apply gaming principles to these
other activities, then it follows that we should be able to improve how people
do all these things.The benefits could
be huge in so many ways.

Of course, the devil is in the details.Just because we enjoy games doesn’t mean we
would enjoy gamified work.Or gamified
romance.And even if we “would” doesn’t
mean we "can" effectively apply gaming principles to make it happen.

But of course the fact that it might not work, and that even
if it does work it will be hard to do and not guaranteed by any stretch, that
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.The
potential is too great not to.